Saturday, 15 March 2014

GM, Ukraine... real life isn't as simple as a two-way choice

Reaction to my piece
last week on genetically modified foods has been interestingly mixed.

Mostly the responses
have come either from people who think GM is a threat to life as we know it, or
those who declare themselves “all for it”.

Both points of view
miss the essential thing I was trying to say. Which was that the term covers
some very good things, some very bad, and some the jury is still out on.

This ought to be a
pretty easy idea to grasp, even if it does leave room for a rather large grey
area. But it seems people like to see every issue in simple black and white
terms.

They are either “for”
or “against” GM, in favour of immigration or passionately opposed, God-fearing
or atheist, vegetarian or carnivorous.

Real grown-up life is more
complex than that – but who wants real life when you can have the cartoon
version?

People like to have
heroes they can cheer and villains they can hiss. They don’t want characters,
or situations, that demand more sophisticated analysis. Or which leave you
harbouring honest unresolved doubts.

Take events currently
unfolding in Ukraine – the gravest crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold
War, we’re told.

That description seems
to me to under-estimate with hindsight the horrors and perils of the ethnic
conflicts that tore the former Yugoslavia into seven parts in the 1990s. But of
course we don’t know yet how the Ukraine story will unfold.

To most people here, including all the major
political parties and pretty much all of the media, Russia is the bad guy. With
Vladimir Putin a conveniently preposterous cut-out villain.

And that must mean
that the government of Ukraine – a government, remember, which came into being
less than three weeks ago – are the goodies.

Nobody here seems to
pause and consider that on this occasion Putin might actually have some justification
for his actions.

To hear an American
Secretary of State, or a British Foreign Minister, exclaiming in horror at one
country “invading” another is frankly breathtaking. Can they not see how hypocritical
that makes them sound to most of the world?

Since 1945, US forces
have invaded a staggering 69 different countries, nearly always with Britain
cheerleading on the sidelines. And it’s seldom been as bloodless as Putin’s
incursion into Ukraine has been so far.

Of course, just
because they’re hypocritical doesn’t make them wrong on this occasion.

Putin’s claim that he
is defending the Russian-speaking majority in the Crimea does sound
uncomfortably like the excuse used by Hitler for his invasions of Austria,
Czechoslovakia and Poland. And there are chilling echoes too of the rumble of
Soviet tanks into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia (again) in 1968.

But Ukraine as it now
exists is an invented country – invented as a part of the old Soviet Union.
When the Crimea was added to it in 1954, it was merely an administrative
decision in Moscow. No one then could have imagined it would have any
consequences 60 years down the line in a republic that had become independent.

Historically, Ukraine
is part of Russia – its very name is Russian for Border-land – and its eastern
region, largely Russian-speaking, has a long history of industrial importance
for Russia.

Considering all this,
it’s by no means clear that Russia is entirely the bad guy.

And it’s even less
obvious that the new regime in Kiev is composed of good guys. It is, as they
say, complicated.

The fall of bad
leaders in Egypt and Libya in 2011 didn’t mean the new men were all good.

Our politicians and
press were eager to pin sheriff’s stars on the rebels, though – especially in Libya,
where Colonel Gaddafi was such a satisfying pantomime baddie.

There has been the
same simplistic tendency over the ghastly situation in Syria. The fact that
President al-Assad is a nasty piece of work doesn’t make all his opponents
paragons of virtue or beacons of hope.

It’s not just more
complicated than that, it’s tragically much, much more complicated.

Some of this, no
doubt, you know. But the urge to allocate black hats and white hats, to
simplify every story into one in which you can take sides, is irrepressible.

To be fair, a couple
of readers were more nuanced in their reactions to my remarks on GM, and my
support for the Norwich-created blight-resistant potato.

“I grew a variety called Sarpo Mira last year on my allotment,”
he told me. “They are very nice indeed, as well as being very versatile.”

Thank you, Matthew, I
might try those.

Meanwhile, my brother
Clive points out that I may have been too eager to simplify matters myself.

“One blight-resistant variety is just one new variety,” he says. “Unless
it replaces every other variety, it’s not going to make much difference at all.
And if it replaces every other variety, we’re into a different problem – loss
of crop diversity.”